Written in the first person singular, as the memoirs and experiences of John Ridd, a seventeenth-century yeoman of Oare, the book, it will be seen, is cast in a fashion not easy to make convincing reading, but it successfully surmounts the difficulties of armchair expressions, and the strong story carries the reader over many a passage otherwise dangerously weak. But it is not great art. It does not compare with Stevenson’s novels in the same manner, written nearly twenty years later. Still, such as it is, it is Blackmore’s best, and although he wrote many other novels, he never again approached “Lorna Doone,” either in sheer writing, or in commercial success. Booksellers stocked, and the public bought, or borrowed from the libraries, his later works, because they were by the author of “Lorna Doone,” and not for their intrinsic merits. For Blackmore always just failed to convince, and never quite dispelled an unreal kind of atmosphere that took his novels quite out of the experiences of actual life, and made his characters so many jumping-jacks, obviously actuated by strings. The origin of “Lorna Doone” demands some notice. Blackmore freely acknowledged that he was led to contemplate a romance on the subject of the legendary wild squatters of these parts by reading a story published in the _Leisure Hour_ during 1863, entitled “The Doones of Exmoor,” a very poor piece of work, loosely strung together from recollections of the Wichehalse and Doone legends that had long been floating about the West Country. He rightly conceived he could do better, and set to work upon his own early recollections of those legends, and, moreover, revisited Porlock and Oare and other places, for the purpose of acquiring more local colour, before beginning to write. The question, Had the Doones ever a real existence? was debated somewhat half-heartedly in the lifetime of Blackmore, but has since his death been more and more keenly continued; until the literature written around the subject, for and against the credibility of such a band of outlaws having really made Exmoor their home, has assumed considerable dimensions. An examination of the evidence available appears to conclusively establish the fact that no unassailably genuine documents have ever been produced by which the existence of the Doones can be proved. No one has ever traced legal documents, baptismal or other registers, or even records of sessional proceedings in which the name Doone appears in Somerset or Devon. Outlaws such as these, illiterate and half-savage, would not, on the face of it, be likely to find a place in church registers; but they would, on the other hand, it is fairly arguable, easily have found mention in the records of punishments, great or small, inflicted upon criminals or petty evil-doers. The inference that they, as Doones, never existed here, is therefore well-nigh irresistible.